Pinion (2 page)

He wasn’t sure why he knew this. Another imperfection of memory, surely, for he had never before traveled so far north of the Wall.

Chin Ping translated quietly. Chin Yuen stared across the fire at Boaz. Some of the others spoke softly.

Later they heard the distant cough of airship engines. Boaz couldn’t tell the type from the sound, but the unseen vessel passed overhead with a steady grumble. The sentries stirred and watched the clouded darkness, but they raised no alarum.

You will have no secrets of me
, Boaz soundlessly told the night.
You who snatched her away from my arms just when I had reached her side once more
.

He didn’t know who he hated worse, the Chinese or the British. At least the Chinese were trying to keep him alive, while the British pursued him with fire and sword. For now, he held his own counsel and despised them all.

Bernard Forthright Kitchens, special clerk to Admiralty, checked himself in the mirror clipped above the chipped basin in his rented room.

His shave was impeccably close. One advantage of having learned the quiet work with a blade was the improvement to this morning ritual that set servants of the Empire apart from the coarser run of men.

Kitchens picked up the straight razor again. Sharp enough to slice muscle down to bone almost unnoticed, as a good blade should be. He worked the edge across his skin, now dry from the earlier shave, to address a few errant whis kers just above his starched collar.

The tug of the metal against his pores was a caress. The danger of such a fine edge near the arteries was a tonic. No hired doxie could approach the passion that a simple length of honed steel inflamed within a thoughtful man.

Closing the razor, he slipped it into the sleeve pocket of his morning coat. The train to Oxfordshire left at 9:07, and he must be aboard or forfeit everything he had worked for. The Queen, the
real
Queen, not that
hired actress who stared from the windows of Buckingham Palace, expected him before noon. The ninth Duke of Marlborough protected his royal charge
sans peur
and
sans pitié
.

Kitchens picked up his bowler with the weighted brim and retrieved his umbrella from the stand. As usual, he made a final check before departing. A bed, a clothes press, a small writing desk. The sole luxury was a rack with the adventure magazines that were his quiet vice. Only a destructively thorough search would turn out the room’s darker secrets. Fingers would be lost and blood poisoned in the pro cess.

Or so he intended.

Out into the press of the crowd, Kitchens became merely another whistling, anonymous man on the London streets, business on his mind.

With one change to a local line, he arrived at Woodstock well before noon. A tiny En glish town, unremarkable save for the Cameron Highlanders at every corner. A stranger would have been stopped and not so politely questioned.

Kitchens was expected.

No one asked his name, because no one needed to. He walked briskly along the carriage road leading southwest out of town toward Blenheim Palace. Every one of the Admiralty special clerks knew of this drill, for any of them could be called upon to deliver some report to the Crown in person.

They almost never were, however.

A gentleman did not traffic in rumors, but Kitchens was not a gentleman; he was a
clerk
. Rumors were his stock in trade, under the name of intelligence. As he passed among the grasses fading to autumn, watching the starlings whirl and chirp overhead, he wondered what the truth was of the Queen.

Many were aware of the woman acting out the role of a lifetime in Buckingham Palace, whom those in the highest levels of Government referred to as “the other Mrs. Brown.” Too many for Kitchens’ taste, but the security of the Crown was not his concern. Not directly.

Some understood that the Queen was in retirement at a country estate. Various locations were bruited about. Kitchens was certain there were more “other Mrs. Browns” in the world.

A very few knew that Her Imperial Majesty had taken up residence at Blenheim, a palace so large that an entire corps of crowned heads could be mislaid within its labyrinthine architecture.

Kitchens knew there must be more beneath even that. He would find out very soon.

The submarine
Five Lucky Winds
pitched, even beneath the waves. Captain Leung had been running at snorkel depth until the Indian Ocean storm had come upon them, but the weather was far more dangerous than a black-line squall.

They should submerge, Emily McHenry Childress knew, but there was some problem with their batteries that defied even Leung’s efforts at translation into En glish. Chief al-Wazir was no help. The gruff, improbably named Scotsman was an experienced air sailor, but never an engineer, and knew almost nothing of the ways of the navy of his lifelong enemies. All Childress herself understood of sailing and
les sous-marins
had been learned aboard this tiny, creaking vessel as it carried her out of her old life in New En gland and into the world of Chinese court politics, divine magic and ancient secrets.

“They’ll be taking her down, soon,” growled al-Wazir. He and Childress crowded in the tiny wardroom. The only place where the Scotsman could stand upright was the laddered tube leading up to the conning tower, but at least here he could sit against a bench and brace his great legs across the cabin. He cradled the stump of his left wrist against his body, as if he still expected the lost hand to grow back.

Looking away from him for a shameful moment, Childress once more thanked her luck at not getting seasick. A lifetime spent among books had hardly prepared her for such adventures. “Captain Leung needs air for the diesels,” she said.

“Not unless they be amphibious.” When al-Wazir was ner vous, his dialect slipped.

“My friend.” Childress forced herself to meet the chief’s haunted eyes, ignoring the missing hand and the wounded soul. “This brave ship has carried me halfway around the Northern Earth without mishap.”

The hull shivered like a struck gong. They both stared up at the seam joining the wardroom overhead and the starboard bulkhead. As always when the submarine ran deep, water trailed in sweaty profusion down the blackened metal.

Her nose remembered that the ship stank—of fuel and brackish water and unwashed coolies and that vile paste with which the crew polished the brightwork. One grew accustomed to such smells, until they vanished from awareness.

It’s the water
, Childress thought.
Water makes me think of light and life
when I am trapped at the bottom of a steel-jacketed well beneath the desert of the ocean
. At least she was not seeing ice creeping on frost-fingers across the bulkhead, as it had when Leung had caused a ghost to be set upon their political officer Choi, back in the Nipponese port of Sendai.

No more political officers here.
Five Lucky Winds
sailed without a flag, since the girl Paolina Barthes had destroyed an entire flotilla of the Nanyang Fleet to stop the massacre of the submarine’s crew. In doing so she had called down the Silent Order’s vengeance upon them all. Enemy to Her Imperial Majesty’s throne in distant London, traitor to the Son of Heaven in Beijing, the surviving crew were friendless and alone in the stormy waters of the Indian Ocean.

The only purpose remaining to them was Childress’ own—stopping the Golden Bridge project, that Chinese effort to cross the Wall using the ancient magics found in Chersonesus Aurea.

“She may be brave, but a smart captain won’t be sailing into a storm like this.” Al-Wazir’s voice had dropped to a rumble that matched the groaning of the hull.

“We’re safe from pursuit, I think.”

“Aye, till them Silent bastards set a watcher or two upon us. Them as has ways of knowing, ma’am.”

He held the right of that. But with secret societies, how could one know?

Timing her movement to the roll of the hull, Childress reached for the chart drawers and tugged out the too-familiar map of the Indian Ocean. Thus far their only course had been to steam north and west, making a furtive landfall at some white-beached islet in the Maldives while endlessly arguing about where to head next. Water was taken on, fresh fruit and fish, but no answers.

She had a purpose, but no goal yet. Where to lever what strength she had?

Childress stared at the map, feet propped up against the little fold-down table.
Blue pajamas
, she thought. All her life she’d have rather been caught dead than wearing pants, and now she shared a room with this great brute of a man, she clad only in blue silk pajamas.

“There must be more to this ocean than storms,” she mused aloud.

“Chinese, coconuts and sharks,” al-Wazir offered.

“Chief, your wisdom would challenge even the ancients.”

He chuckled. She glanced up again to see an unfamiliar gleam in his eyes.

This man had loved Paolina unreasonably. Childress suspected he mourned the girl more than he mourned his lost left hand.

Childress turned the map in her hands. She had all but memorized the
ports of this ocean, the little picture-words of their Chinese names dancing in her head as she placed them in her
ars memoriae
. Al-Wazir had filled in a few for her in En glish: Aden, Mogadishu. Leung had filled in others: Phu Ket, Penang, Colombo.

A long way from New Haven.

“Chief,” Childress asked. “What’s this place on the west coast of India? I cannot tell if it’s colored differently, or if that’s just a stain on the map.”

“On this vessel? They’d have the midshipmen inking a new chart before they’d leave a soiled one in the drawer.” Al-Wazir had acquired a grudging respect for Chinese seamanship that ran deeply against the grain of all his years in the Royal Navy airship ser vice.

She let another roll of the hull pass, then slid the chart to him. “Look. There.”

“Aye . . .” He squinted a little while. “And it might be Goa.”

“Goa?” The word meant nothing to Childress.

“A city of mad dogs and Portugee.”

“Literally? I thought the Empire controlled everything in the western part of the ocean.”

“There’s control and then there’s control,” al-Wazir said. “Some places follow their own law.”

“Like the Indians in America.”

“All of ’em wogs,” the big man said, already sliding back toward his depression.

Finally, a place to stand
, she thought.
And plot our next move
. My
next move
.

Fleeing her own power, and the greed of men, she’d listened to the angel tell her of someone she should meet. Paolina had expected to be brought before a jeweled throne. Or introduced to an ancient sage beneath a withered peach tree.

Not
this
.

The Southern Earth lay beneath her, the curve of the globe quite visible from her dizzying altitude high up along the Wall. Ming was ahead, trying to find a route around a knob of stone that would force them back several days if they could not pass it. He was roped to a promising nub in the outward-leaning rock face, but if he fell, she didn’t see how to rescue him.

The gleam was heavy in her pocket: the new stemwinder she’d built aboard the dying Chinese airship, when she’d needed to escape the Wall storm that had threatened their lives. The new one she’d used to take hundreds, possibly thousands of lives. No matter that she’d saved herself,
the surviving crew of
Five Lucky Winds
, al-Wazir and that strange En glish librarian Childress. Paolina had sworn off dealing with death after the explosion in Strasbourg, which was as surely her fault as if she’d lit a fuse herself.

Otherwise she could simply
move
them off the Wall.

The last time she had used the gleam to do that, hundreds died in the resulting earthquakes. The world went to great trouble to right itself after such an insult. Which ought to be a clue to any thinking man or woman as to how such magic was intended to be used.

That was to say:
not at all
.

She desperately needed to shed herself of this power, without being destroyed by it.

Ming shouted something. She looked up from her reverie to see him wave. He then began making his slow, patient way back to the anchor point of his rope. Paolina watched carefully, marking the handholds and footholds the sailor used. She was longer of leg and arm than he, but his strength overmatched hers.

Enough
, she thought.
When there are no choices, one simply does what must be done
. If there had been anything to learn from the sad, quiet women of Praia Nova in her youn gest days, it was that.

Soon enough she was roped and climbing outward. Paolina clung to the rock like a leech, forcing herself into the Wall so the ancient, cruel magic of gravity would not pluck her down untimely. The stone was damp and gritty, far too soft to be trusted. The pain rose quickly in her arms as an acidic burn that gave no quarter. She worked her way along, always gripping with three points while moving the fourth.

Again Ming shouted. Paolina’s section of the Wall was tilted forward like a dog trying to shed a troublesome insect.